Re: Using A Variac
I'm well acquainted with 'cerrem' (AKA "chrism") back from the glory days of usenet. He might as well be Zelig, he claims to have been everywhere and known everyone in their prime. Last time I saw him online was on the Weber amp board, he was spouting a bunch of BS about something in an argument with Ted Weber. As his position got less and less defensible, he wrote more and more technobabble until Ted made him look pretty pathetic.
In any case, putting a resistor across the primaries has an effect not unlike the Matchless-style master volume, where you shunt some signal from one side of the phase inverter to the other, cancelling it and reducing volume. The difference here is it's being done not with signal, but with power.
It sort of turns the power amp into two parallel, polarity-opposed single-ended amps. Stresses hell out of the tubes and the OT primary, since most push-pull OTs aren't designed for large DC offsets.
